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Radeon Gallium3D Still Long Shot From Catalyst

Phoronix: Radeon Gallium3D Still Long Shot From Catalyst

Following recent advancements in the open-source Radeon Linux driver like 2D color tiling support, I've carried out some new benchmarks of the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver compared to AMD's official Catalyst driver. This time around, the open-source driver is seeing tests against AMD's binary blob when various performance-optimizing tweaks are enabled to see where the performance stands today.

I know I am maybe asking too much. But I think it would be quite interesting to see traces(apitrace supports CPU profiling) of the benchmarks for the very slow results at least, just to get a better idea where the binary drivers are faster.

Btw I think one could actually use api traces of games as benchmarks. This would additionally ensure that the same call paths are executed, no fall-backs or workarounds for specific hardware taken.

PS:
Can someone point me to a tutorial of some sort on how to get the latest mesa stuff running next to catalyst. Are phoronix test setups documented?

Michael, where is the Doom3 test?
I still consider this wide gap between r600g and Catalyst on higher res/quality to be due to still missing optimizing shader compiler.
At lower res/quality GPU can keep with unoptimized shaders, but with lots of pixels the game changes. What happened with Vadim Girlin's initiative on that?

nvidia had hardware scheduler so far, and that is the reason for better nouveau speed, event unsupported by nvidia, but now with kepler, they go AMD route, with software scheduler in the driver ( at least thats what anandtech says ).

Can someone point me to a tutorial of some sort on how to get the latest mesa stuff running next to catalyst. Are phoronix test setups documented?

Three choices:
* Use a distribution like gentoo that actually allows several libGL implementations to exist on your system. You need to load modules manually, and switch between two xorg.conf (i.e. forget XDM), but it can work.
* Just install a separate OS on a different partition. Maybe play around with UnionFS to save space.
* Try to manually install both on an unsupported system, go crazy over the conflicts that arise, eventually bork your system and reinstall.

Honestly, if you have to ask how to do it, go with option 2. It's safer.

In trivial pixel-pushing benchmarks like OpenArena, Warsow and Padman, the OSS drivers are slower, but well within playable range. 500+ FPS is really not anything anyone cares about. 120Hz should be enough for anyone :P

With a more complex game at high resolution (Xonotic @1080p), the OSS drivers are at 60-65% of performance. This is a really good number. With HiZ and some shader compiler optimisation, it should reach 75%, which is really close to the best that can be reasonably expected from the open stack. At 75% performance, the OSS drivers becomes a real option for everyone other than people who need the absolute ultimate performance (scientific computing and elite gamerz). It's fast enough for the desktop and casual gaming, and the missing performance costs 20 bucks if you really need it. That would be wonderful! And don't forget that future generations (HD 7000) should be easier to optimise due to the switch away from VLIW.

It's interesting to see that Nexuiz is so much slower than Xonotic, as they are basically the same game... No idea what happened there. Also, more challenging benchmarks like doom3 would be nice.